Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with Susan Kay or Gaston Leroux. Please don't sue me. There are a few quotes from Phantom in this chapter and I assure you that I did not write them, they are the property of Susan Kay.
Author's Notes: My most sincere apologies for the delay, readers. This chapter has been a bit of a struggle to write (I've been struggling physically with Erik, my 'beloved' muse, who doesn't like to be thrown into this story so unceremoniously) and I hope you'll like it.
Just a quick note: it's not very E/OW. In fact, it's hardly E/OW at all. No love or romance, I'm afraid to say. Sorry to disappoint anybody.
Chapter Two: The Black Magician
People thought I knew him better than others.
But I didn't. I didn't know him at all. Nobody did.
I saw him as many things. I saw him as my saviour from the Khanum's boredom, I saw him as a heartless murderer, I saw him as a cold genius…and I saw him as the monster that lay behind the mask.
Oh, Allah, that face! That face, which by right should belong on a rotting dead thing, plastered on the skull of a living, breathing human being! It set him apart from the whole race, driving people away from him as if such a deformity could be contagious. Everywhere he went he was alone, except for the times when he was accompanied by the Daroga. I supposed the Daroga was assigned the task of spying on Erik by the suspicious young Shah. Why else would he want to spend time in the company of such an inhuman…thing?
It wasn't just his face that made me develop an instinctive fear and loathing towards Erik. I was prepared to accept that Allah worked in mysterious ways and if it was Allah's will that this man was so horrendously deformed, then a slave like me had no right to be revolted by it. No, unlike so many others, I might have been able to see past the mask, past the face, into the man that lay within.
But there was no human man inside him. I watched him kill man after man with the same indifferent efficiency people use for killing chicken and cattle. How could he not realise that the thing he was strangling was not a dummy or an animal, but a human, a fellow man? Later, I grew unable to watch while his lasso whistled through the air to silence another unfortunate victim; I couldn't look; I was too afraid. Not afraid of seeing death, I had seen plenty of that, but I was terrified that one day I too would adopt the same uncaring air as he about killing. It was a foolish fear, really. I was only a young slave girl, quite incapable of doing harm to anyone, even if the murder weapon was placed directly into my hands. I wasn't anything like the power-hungry monster that had made its nest deep in the heart of the Persian Court.
Our first encounter was in the harem, a place I wasn't allowed out of, and in normal circumstances, a place where he would not be allowed in. Until then, only doctors had been allowed to enter the harem to tend to a concubine or wife of the Shah, and on some occasions, to the Khanum herself. This time, the Khanum wanted a look at her new…toy or possible favourite.
I say 'our' encounter, but I don't suppose he even glimpsed me, hiding behind two of my mistresses. Perhaps it was a lucky thing that he never saw me, or even looked in the direction of the Shah's women, one fleeting glance could have cost him his life. He may have known it, or he simply may not have been interested in us, I don't know. Even later, no one could tell exactly what he was thinking.
My eyes were fixed on him the whole time. He was different from the other courtiers, yet somehow the same. He had the same animalistic power-hungry aura surrounding him.
His attire was strange and utterly foreign to me and what skin we could see was pale. He was French, or he claimed to be. He dressed like a European gentleman; black cloak, black jacket, black breeches, black fedora…all the neat, normal items of clothing contrasted strongly with the strange white mask that completely covered his face. He was like a misshaped dummy in a tailor's shop, stuffed into eveningwear. The clothes hung off his skeletal frame and harshly emphasised his thinness. His hands, the only part of him that he left uncovered, were like large, pale spiders, with unnaturally long bones where fingers normally were. Yet his hands were a part of him that I did not find repulsive at all…there was a strange sensuality in their every movement, that against my will, I found oddly attractive.
But the most remarkable part of him was his voice. What can I say about that voice? It imprints itself in the memory forever…emphasising his every word even when softly spoken. The moment he spoke, the world around me seemed to vanish and nothing existed outside of that voice that wrapped me in a silky cocoon of sound that I never wanted to emerge from.
"Remove the mask!" The Khanum's first order to him. Take off the mask. It caused some uneasy shuffling behind her.
"He will surely murder us all!" whispered one concubine to another. I peered out from behind my mistresses, unable to resist my curiosity. I regretted it at once. I saw him, the strange, tall European magician, but I also saw it, the savage monster lurking somewhere inside him. There were no visible eyes behind the eyeholes of the mask, only black pits, but they seemed filled with a terrifyingly intense hatred and barely controlled anger that I had never seen before. I shrank back into the shadows and prayed to Allah that he hadn't seen me.
"Madame," he replied coolly, his slightly trembling hands betraying his emotion, "I crave your indulgence in this matter. I would rather not." A collective gasp went up amongst the women. The Khanum had never been defied before…never! We waited with bated breath for the sentence to fall but she merely smiled an oddly amused smile and threatened, in a tone that almost matched his in calmness, to have her eunuchs remove the mask and his head with it. Again, he made no move to obey her. She issued a second threat, to have him turned into a Chinese eunuch, and he challenged it. He challenged it and he lived! A third time she ordered him to remove the mask, there was a terrible, tense moment of waiting…and then the mask landed at her feet.
Complete panic broke out behind the Khanum. The concubines shrieked and tugged their gauze veils lower over their faces. I found myself rapidly shoved to the front of the crowd of screaming, hysterical women. And then I got my first glimpse of that face.
In truth, it was more like a stare. I didn't scream, nor did I struggle to get away. I just stared. I stared at his dark hollow where a nose would have been. I stared at the shrivelled yellow skin pulled taut over his skull.
I stared and I felt no more fear because of it.
I felt only pity and disbelief.
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